BEFORE YOU HIRE AN OLD HOUSE CONTRACTOR
Once upon a time, I was standing in line at a Japanese take-out (great place!) & stepped back when I noticed the grungy guy in front of me. He was wearing a t-shirt that had seen 1,000 better days. It was a bit hiked up in the back, & I could almost see his...
THE STORY OF THE CHICAGO BUNGALOW
The story of the Chicago bungalow isn't about the houses, it’s about the humanity. I call it, “Grits & girdles history.” Because our houses tell the stories of the lives of the people who built them & how they lived, worked & formed their communities- the...
OLD HOUSE CLASSES
By attending old house classes, a conscientious steward can learn the basics of old house repair & maintenance. Owning an old house is not for sissies, nor for the uninformed. When I owned The Hare House, my 1910 Craftsman in Eagle Rock, I made some mistakes that...
BUNGALOW CHARACTERISTICS, Part 1
Let's break down some bungalow characteristics to better understand what makes a bungalow, a bungalow. Character defining features, as further explained in the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Historic Preservation Projects is a term that means the way the...
OUR OLD HOUSES ARE BUILT FROM OLD GROWTH WOOD
From their framing to their siding to their doors & windows to their built-ins & their flooring, our old houses, are built of old growth wood. Thousands of board feet of it. "Old growth." What does that mean? Let's have a tree history lesson. Fossils show that...
MY 1910 CRAFTSMAN IN EAGLE ROCK
The story begins with my love affair with the Alfred W. & Grace D. Hare House, a beautiful Craftsman, in Eagle Rock, a bungalow neighborhood in N.E. Los Angeles. Once an incorporated town in its own right, Eagle Rock is just west of Pasadena & was clearly...
STAY HEALTHY WHEN RESTORING AN OLD HOUSE
It’s not easy to stay healthy when restoring an old house. Increased demands on your time, your finances, the toxins in the materials you will demo & install, & the stress of making constant decisions, facing too many surprises mean that to stay strong, you...
PAINTING A BUNGALOW LINOLEUM FLOOR
The reason I'm even proposing the weird idea of painting a bungalow linoleum floor is because lino wears out. Through decades of footsteps in some of the highest traffic areas of the house, roller skates & doggy toenails, abrasion can annihilate the printed...
AMERICAN BUNGALOW MAGAZINE COMES TO CENTRAL FLORIDA
What seems like a lifetime ago, with a great amount of help from my friends in the 3 areas that make up the bungalow neighborhood of Seminole Heights, in Tampa, Florida, I produced an American Bungalow Magazine event. I had coaxed, cajoled, pleaded with the editor to...
